I’m not sure where whimsy fits into that list, but my dishwasher plays a little victory tune when it finishes washing. It sounds like something from an early 90s jrpg. It makes me smile every time I hear it.

if you put the exact same person in the exact same situation (a perfect to the molecular level) they will behave differently.

I don’t consider that relevant to sentience. Structurally, biological systems change based on inputs. LLMs cannot. I consider that plasticity to be a prerequisite to sentience. Others may not.

We will undoubtedly see systems that can incorporate some kind of learning and mutability into LLMs. Re-evaluating after that would make sense.

An LLM is a deterministic function that produces the same output for a given input - I’m using “deterministic” in the computer science sense. In practice, there is some output variability due to race conditions in pipelined processing and floating point arithmetic, that are allowable because they speed up computation. End users see variability because of pre-processing of the prompt and extra information LLM vendors inject when running the function, as well as how the outputs are selected.

I have a hard time considering something that has an immutable state as sentient, but since there’s no real definition of sentience, that’s a personal decision.

I use a stationary bike in front of a TV. My brain is off anyway, so I might as well put my body to work.

Another alternative is to find a sport that you enjoy, or a social group that makes the activity enjoyable.

C’MON YOU FUCKERS! YOU CAN DO IT! BLOW AWAY WAR!

begun, the cyberwars have

Linux users: people think about us

People: I wonder what’s for dinner